50
And I listen for answers in the cold wind, for instruction, for comfort, but all I hear is the infallible promise of winter. Night after night I cry out for Edith.
– Edith! Edith!
– Ara ara ara arrroooowwww, cries the wolf silhouette on the hill.
– Help me, F. Explain the bombs!
– Ara ara ara arroooowwww….
Dream after dream we all lie in each other’s arms. Morning after morning the winter finds me alone among the frayed leaves, frozen snot and tears in my eyebrows.
– F.! Why did you lead me here?
And do I hear an answer? Is this treehouse the hut of Oscotarach? F., are you the Head-Piercer? I did not know the operation was so long and clumsy. Raise the blunt tomahawk and try once more. Poke the stone spoon among the cerebral porridge. Does the moonlight want to get into my skull? Do the sparkling alleys of the icy sky want to stream through my eyeholes? F., were you the Head-Piercer, who left his hut and applied to the public ward in pursuit of his own operation? Or are you still with me, and is the surgery deep in progress?
– F., you lousy wife-fucker, explain yourself!
I cry that question out tonight, as I cried it out many times before. I remember your annoying habit of looking over my shoulders as I studied, just on the off chance that you might pick up a phrase of cocktail information. You noticed a line from a letter le P. Lalemant wrote in 1640, “que le sang des Martyrs est la semence des Chrestiens.” Le P. Lalemant regretting that no priest had yet been put to death in Canada, and that this was a bad augury for the young Indian missions, for the blood of Martyrs is the seed of the Church.
– The Revolution in Québec needs the lubrication of a little blood.
– Why are you looking at me that way, F.?
– I’m wondering if I’ve taught you enough.
– I don’t want any of your filthy politics, F. You’re a thorn in the side of Parliament. You’ve smuggled dynamite into Québec disguised as firecrackers. You’ve turned Canada into a vast analyst’s couch from which we dream and redream nightmares of identity, and all your solutions are as dull as psychiatry. And you subjected Edith to many irregular fucks which broke her mind and body and left me the lonely bookworm whom you now torment.
– Oh my darling, what a hunchback History and the Past have made of your body, what a pitiful hunchback.
We stood close together, as we’d stood in so many rooms, this time in the sepia gloom of the library stacks, our hands in each other’s pockets. I always resented his superior expression.
– Hunchback! Edith had no complaints about my body.
– Edith! Ha! Don’t make me laugh. You know nothing about Edith.
– Keep your tongue off her, F.
– I cured Edith’s acne.
– Edith’s acne indeed! She had perfect skin.
– Ho ho.
– It was lovable to kiss and touch.
– Thanks to my famous soap collection. Listen, friend, when I first met Edith she was in an ugly mess.
– No more, F. I don’t want to hear any more.
– The time has come for you to learn just who it was whom you married, just who that girl was whom you discovered per -forming extraordinary manicures in the barber shop of the Mount Royal Hotel.
– No, F., please. Don’t destroy anything more. Leave me with her body. F.! What is happening to your eyes? What is happening to your cheeks? Are those tears? Are you weeping?
– I am wondering what will happen to you when I leave you alone.
– Where are you going?
– The Revolution needs a little blood. It will be my blood.
– Oh no!
– London has announced the Queen’s intention to visit French Canada in October 1964. It is not enough that she and Prince Philip will be greeted by police cordons, riot tanks, and the proud backs of hostile crowds. We must not make the mistake the Indians made. Her advisers in London must be made to understand that our dignity is fed with the same food as anyone’s: the happy exercise of the arbitrary.
– What do you intend to do, F.?
– There is a statue of Queen Victoria on the north side of Sherbrooke Street. We have passed it many times on our way to the darkness of the System Theatre. It is a pleasant statue of Queen Victoria in early womanhood before pain and loss had made her fat. It is cast in copper which is now green with age. Tomorrow night I will place a charge of dynamite on her metal lap. It is only the copper effigy of a dead Queen (who knew, incidentally, the meaning of love), it is only a symbol, but the State deals in symbols. Tomorrow night I will blow that symbol to smithereens – and myself with it.
– Don’t do it, F. Please.
– Why not?
I know nothing about love, but something like love tore the following words from my throat with a thousand fishhooks:
– BECAUSE I NEED YOU, F.
A sad smile spread on my friend’s face. He extracted his left hand from my warm pocket, and extending his arms as if in a benediction he crushed me to his Egyptian shirt in a warm bear hug.
– Thank you. Now I know that I have taught you enough.
– BECAUSE I NEED YOU, F.
– Stop whimpering.
– BECAUSE I NEED YOU, F.
– Hush.
– BECAUSE I NEED THEE, F.
– Goodbye.
I felt lonely and cold as he walked away, the brown books along the steel shelves rustling like windy heaps of fallen leaves, each with the same message of exhaustion and death. As I set this down I have a clear impression of F.’s pain. His pain! Oh yes, as I peel off this old scab of history, gleaming like one pure triumphant drop of red blood –
